Friday, July 17, 2015

I haven't been posting here for the past few months because I've been busy - busy engaged in the world of real politics. I've been participating in (and to a certain extent, helping to organise) the Reclaim Australia rallies, and will be attending one tomorrow - one which will be perhaps the biggest nationalist event in Australian history.

Reclaim Australia was organised - like so many other mass movements today - primarily on social media; it held its first nationwide rally in April 2015. It managed to succeed in doing what no other Far Right, nationalist and patriot movement has done in Australia: bring together hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians out on to the streets - Australians of all ages, all classes, both genders and of all political persuasions. I myself had seen nothing like it, and made more contacts and did more networking for my particular group in one day than in fifteen years.

One simple idea stood behind Reclaim: anti-Islam. Anyone of any race, any creed was welcome to the rallies, so long as they were opposed to Islam. Reclaim can't be categorised as a white nationalist or neo-Nazi movement at all, and its openness - and the absence of any racial aspect to its ideology - helps explain its success. 'Bogans' - that is, working-class Australians (who make up the majority of the Reclaim attendees) - won't attend a rally in the name of Australian nationalism or white nationalism (i.e., a 'Worldwide White People's Day'), but they will attend something that purports to be 'patriotic'. And for Aussies, Islam provides a focus and a starting point and serves many a useful purpose. For one, as we are told, over and over, 'Islam is a religion, not a race', and anti-Islamists can't be accused of 'racism'. Secondly, no-one can deny - after reading Bill Warner's works - that Islam preaches values which are antithetical to Western values (or, for that matter, anyone's values). Third, a connection exists between Islamic jihad and violence - a connection which is undeniable. (On the Friday before the Reclaim rally in April, Islamic 'extremists' massacred around 150 Kenyan schoolchildren). These three points, I think, suffice to put anti-Islam and the anti-Islamic political movement on a higher level than any other 'Far Right' and nationalist political movement out there, in Australia at least; anti-Islam excels in terms of efficacy and sheer usefulness.

After April, anti-communism was added to the Reclaim platform. As of now, the platform consists of three planks: 'patriotism', anti-Islam and anti-Communism. Why the latter? In Melbourne in April, hundreds of Trotskyite communists turned up and attempted to prevent the Reclaim rally from going ahead; they used coercion and violence, spat at and assaulted people (including the elderly), etc., etc., and did all the things that communists have been doing for the past hundred years. For many on the Australian Far Right, the events of April in Melbourne provided a wake-up call. Many patriots and nationalists must have thought, beforehand, that the state decided which political movements were allowed to march and to assemble in public; that wasn't the case. The communists decide it, and for forty years or more they have attempted to usurp the state's monopoly on violence and coercion. They decide who gets to march and who doesn't. That explains, in part, why the Far Right in this country hasn't succeeded in getting off the ground. A political movement that exists in the real world - as opposed to on the Internet - needs to rent halls and hold meetings, distribute literature, hold rallies, advertise itself, stand in elections, assemble in public. It can't do any of these if, for instance, three to four hundred communists line up outside a meeting hall rented by nationalists and use violence to prevent attendees from going in.

As I said, for many patriots and nationalists in April, the veil dropped; communist violence awoke them to the reality of the political situation of nationalists in Australia. I like to think that, on an instinctive level, many of them began to understand what Mosley, Hitler, Mussolini were all about. The BUF, the Italian Fascists, the NSDAP Brownshirts, didn't engage in street brawls with commies for fun; they did so because they knew, as political movements, they wouldn't flourish, much less survive, if they allowed the communists to keep hold of the streets.

Communists can't present a challenge to the state, and the existing political system, through the ballot box, but they can use violence and coercion to pick off any fringe political movements - and that includes Reclaim - and by doing so they challenge the liberal democratic state. Liberal democracy protects weak, small and fringe movements; it allows them to participate in political life and gives them a seat at the table, as it were. But if it fails to protect those movements from communist thugs, it fails, as it were. So, by attacking nationalists, communist manage to chip away, a small piece at a time, at the foundations of the liberal democratic state.

The communist 'vanguard party' (or, as Trotsky calls it, the 'combat party') must be kept in condition; it must be used, constantly, or otherwise fall into a state of disuse and disrepair. The membership must be radicalised and be kept in fighting form; the leadership orders the members to participate in acts of political violence. If they don't do this, then, like any army which has been kept out of combat for a while, they will atrophy. Then their precious revolution won't come about.

One can't debate a communist; he won't listen to reason. You can try and persuade him that his actions - at the April rally, for instance - were immoral and illegal; you can try and argue that communism doesn't work, didn't work in Russia or China, and has been rejected - and will continue to be rejected - by the Russians and Chinese themselves. But you're wasting your breath. Communism tends to brainwash its adherents, who become immune to proof or disproof. Trotskyism in practice seems to be much more cultish than the other communist subgroupings, and Australia boasts a large number of Trotskyite communist groups - around six or seven. The largest of these - Socialist Alternative - numbers, according to former member John Passant, only around 300. But, if you put all the Trotskyite subgroups together on the same day in Melbourne, you wind up with a sizeable force.

(I don't want to give the impression that the communists here in Australia are made up of tough nuts; most of the communists I've encountered strike me as being physically weak and, what's more, confused - about their racial and sexual identity, among other things. Suffice to say that they do present a bigger political obstacle here than in many other Western countries. The Southern nationalist and pro-Confederate flag rallies in the US have met with little organised communist opposition, for instance).

Reclaim resembles the German movement PEGIDA in several ways, and as we know, the communist opposition in Germany was unable to shut down PEGIDA - in Dresden at least. The Dresden marchers outnumbered the communists every time. The PEGIDA marchers didn't need to protect themselves from the communists, because the latter weren't large enough, and weren't willing to physically attack the big numbers of 'ordinary' Germans - the German equivalent of our 'mums and dads' and 'bogans'. The German communists tried to sell the public on the idea that PEGIDA were, like all Far Right movements in the West, 'Nazi' and 'fascist', but this didn't fly. Perhaps the example of PEGIDA offers a way forward for Reclaim.

The question is, will Reclaim last, or will it fizzle out - like PEGIDA, like Occupy Wall Street, like the Tea Party, like so many other groups built on the back of a mass movement.

The Jewish-American communist theorist Hal Draper wrote at length on the difference 'sects' (or 'micro-parties') on the Left and between real socialist mass movements. A man of libertarian-Marxist leanings, he regarded the mass movements of the Left as being more authentic than the sects and micro-parties. I agree with him on that point and think that his political model can be carried across to nationalist politics. If you look at nationalism in Australia and elsewhere, you'll find plenty of sects and micro-parties and very little in the way of a mass movement (which I define as an unorganised mass of people united around one central political idea). Australian nationalists (and I am one of the guilty ones) form groups with a small number of long-term activists (the 'hardcores', the 'cadre men') and then go to play a game of 'let's pretend' - let's pretend we're a political party (with tens of thousands of members, like the mainstream political parties) with a genuine mass base. These micro-parties and sects engage in frantic stickering, postering, pamphleteering, electioneering; they hold poorly attended political rallies, party meetings, lectures and socials; they write up constitutions, party platforms, and, for their meetings, agendas and minutes; they beat their breasts and make outrageous claims - claims to represent the great Australian nation and even the entire white race. But it turns out that hardly anyone out there in the Australian electorate is listening. In a strange way, the nationalist micro-parties turn into mirror images of the communist.

Having said that, something can be said for the sect: it endures - many a mass movement doesn't. As Marx said, the left-wing sect proves its usefulness by keeping the flame of socialism flickering during lean times (lean times for socialism, when nobody is interested in it, least of all the workers). But during times of great political ferment, when the masses are moving towards socialism, the left-wing sect becomes an impediment - 'reactionary', in Marx's words, that is, an obstacle to progress. I categorise these times as ones of great ferment for nationalism: certainly more of the Australian masses than ever are becoming involved in nationalism or 'patriotism' or anti-Islam. The political sects on the Far Right - including my own - have become, to a certain extent, redundant, and it behoves any sect-monger at this time to get out of the way and not impede progress. But, on the other hand, Reclaim could easily fall apart. Mass movements don't last long, and the historical record shows this. If and when Reclaim - or any similar mass movement in Australian Far Right politics - ceases to exist, the little sects (including my own) will carry the torch.

What differentiates a mass movement from a micro-party? The sect leader tends to draw up an party platform of, say, 30 or 40 ideas that everyone - no exceptions allowed! - must take on board if they decide to become a member of the sect. Now, in politics, disagreement constitutes the norm. In the interests of peace and harmony, a political movement should restrict itself to two or three points. The communist platform - for over a century - has consisted of two planks: the abolition of property and the dictatorship of the proletariat (that is to say, the dictatorship of the communist party). On those two points, the communist party will not bend. The simplicity of this platform explains much of communism's historical success.

Likewise, the NSDAP platform could be summed up in three points. To be a German National Socialist, one had to be of the Germanic racial character; anti-Semitic; and cognisant of the absolute and unquestioned leadership of Adolf Hitler. Historians of the NSDAP may warble about the '25 points' of German National Socialism, but the three I've mentioned here make up the essentials. Again, we see here a simple party program. The sect monger makes things unnecessarily complicated and by his actions encourages foment and discord. This explains why so many of the Trotskyite sects fall apart and splinter; they show a knack for encouraging disagreement - strong disagreement - amongst their members. The Trotskyite leadership takes one firm, uncompromising line on, for instance, far-off events in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan and expects all the party rank and file to submit to this line (that's 'democratic centralism'). This approach causes fractures. (The irony is that a Trotskyite micro-party in the West can do very little about events in, say, Iraq, but it will stake its political reputation on them). Far better to keep things simple, and to repeat, historical communist movements - such as the Chinese and the Russian - succeeded only by keeping things simple and tolerating a fair amount of disagreement over unessential points.

I don't deny that dogmatism and rigidity have a place in a political movement. In communist lore, a distinction is drawn between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in the Russian communist party: the former followed the path of 'true' Marxism, the latter a liberal version. Communists call this the two-line struggle, and it's here - on the side of Marxism-Leninism in the Bolshevik versus Menshevik debate - that the communist theorist makes his stand. Even the most open-minded communist here can be dogmatic, exclusionary and sectarian with a clean conscience. I posit that a similar two-line struggle exists in the Australian nationalist and patriot movement. What are those lines? To me, the line exists between the neo-Nazis and the non-neo-Nazis. Undoubtedly, 'neo-Nazis' exist in the Reclaim movement and in the Australian nationalist scene; they are outnumbered - in the Reclaim movement, but not in Australian nationalism as a whole - by the non-neo-Nazis.

I'll give here a working definition of 'neo-Nazism'. We could say that German Nationalism consists of three main principles, as outlined by Hitler in his essay 'Road to Resurgence' (1927). These are: a) the importance of race and, furthermore, the quality of the race; b) a conception of life as struggle; c) the importance of 'personality' - the idea of greatness, in individual men and in nations. I think that the first explains itself. The other two, however, require explanation. Regarding the conception of life as struggle - Hitler and the National Socialists believed that good things came about only through struggle - that is to say, good political things. Unfortunately, if we want a good political result (especially in Australia), we will only arrive at it through struggle - struggle against the communists. We know that the communists need to be thoroughly defeated, defeated in detail, and driven in to the ground. It's only then that we can hold our meetings, rallies, conferences in public. As for 'personality', well, that's easy enough to understand. We need to recognise the differences, not only between races and between nations, but between men. Some men show a genius; they may be more talented - at music, painting, architecture, science - than others. The same applies in the political sphere: great political leaders exist. We can regard Hitler as one of those leaders. Without doubt, he made mistakes here and there but only God doesn't make mistakes. The crucial thing is that we must beware of the anti-Hitlerians - those in the 'nationalist movement' who constantly carp, criticise when it comes to Hitler and National Socialist Germany. These people, by attacking Hitler relentlessly, constantly, are in fact denying the idea of the greatness of Man - that Man can (especially in politics) be great. They don't want you to believe that there can be good and great politicians. (As I said, one can find many of these sceptics and scorners in our movement; they often masquerade as those who hold the interests of the Western peoples, and the white race, at heart).

So, the 'neo-Nazi' activist needs to obey three precepts: defend the importance of race; defend the conception of 'life as struggle'; defend Hitler, National Socialism and Germany, especially against the charges of 'Holocausting' six million Jews in giant gas chambers in Auschwitz and other places. Obviously, one can't do this at all places, all times. One needs to bend a little here and there. In a mass movement, one will come across plenty of people who make foolish and fatuous statements about 'Nazism' and 'fascism': an ill-informed person may make comparisons between, say, Nazism and Islam or even Hitler and Obama. One has to let that pass. Likewise, if the organisers at a nationalist rally - such as the one being held tomorrow - bring in busloads of supporters who are not, in their racial provenance, white, well, one has to let that pass also. One must prioritise: communism in Australia must be defeated, so, ill-informed people - and, for that matter, non-whites - must be allowed into the movement, temporarily. After communism has been expunged, then we shall straighten people's thinking out. But, before we shall enforce any 'party line' - that is, any neo-Nazi (as I have defined it) party line - we must build a genuine mass movement, and from there, a real political party.